Layoffs stable
- Continuing claims down
- Initial claims flat
- Wage growth picking up?
Narrator: Something really interesting just happened in the labor market.
So there's labor data that we get every Thursday morning at 8:30 Eastern. It's initial jobless claims. It really just tells us how many people are filing for unemployment insurance if they happen to get laid off from their job.
In addition to that, we get something called continuing jobless claims. That just tells us how many people continue to file for unemployment insurance if they can't find another job.
And this is interesting because in the past week, we saw continuing jobless claims fall to their lowest since January of 2024.
Animation: Chart shows continuing weekly jobless claims ticking downward.
Narrator: And for the post-pandemic cycle, we really haven't seen a big pickup in initial jobless claims.
Animation: Chart shows initial weekly jobless claims trending relatively flatly since the spike during the 2020 Covid pandemic.
There hasn't been this widespread layoff activity.
If anything, people who have gotten laid off have taken a little bit longer to find a job.
So you were seeing that stress show up in something like continuing claims.
But now what's interesting is that continuing claims have started to roll over.
That could mean that we're starting to see some tightness in the labor market, which could mean that you see some inflation pressure coming from higher wages down the line.
Some official statistics, like average hourly earnings, are not necessarily showing this yet.
Animation: Chart shows the Atlanta Fed wage growth tracker rebounding to a recent high of 4.1% after a low of 3.5% in May 2026.
But there are other statistics like the wage growth tracker from the Atlanta Fed, which is giving us a little bit of a hint that maybe there is a turn in wage growth that's happening right now